Wise words from Burningbird.

Drowning in a Sea of Surety. I think that we should designate one day per week to be Humility Day. Or perhaps Day of Doubt or Insecurity Day. Each weblog we visit, the owner--myself included--pontificates on all the wrongs and evils of the day. Expressing opinions is a good thing, but lately it seems that even the most thoughtful weblog writers are screaming their words out, pages covered with the spit of their emotional outbursts, saturated with surety. Not just in politics: I'm finding the same level of surety in technology and tool usage, even which operating system we use. It's as if none of us can tolerate even the slightest possibility of doubt in our choices. We can't just talk about how nice our TiBooks are--we ... [Burningbird]

10:54:21 PM •  • comment  

This was adjacent to the Dali quote item I just posted in my aggregator. Is it a job prerequisite that school administrators have no sense of humor?

High school, sex, the student press, and CNN. A longtime close friend, Mike Mahoney (we were both editors at the Sacramento Bee), penned an opinion piece in today's Bee. Mike is now a high school English teacher and student paper adviser. Turns out Mike's paper was at the... [JD's New Media Musings]

10:51:24 PM •  • comment  

It does make you wonder whether those most eager to wrap protections around ideas lear that they don't have enough ideas. Reminds me of Linus Pauling's observation that "the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas."

Dali quote for the open copyright folks.

In London, i went to the Dali exhibit. At the entrance, they had hundreds of "wacky" quotes by Dali about sex, his philosophy (and his belief that philosophy doesn't exist), art and everything you could imagine. I came across one that made me immediately think of a few of the copyright crusaders that i know, so i thought i'd share:

Ideas are made to be copied. I have enough ideas to sell them on. I prefer that they are stolen so that i don't have to actually use them myself.

It's from an interview where he's being asked about his art, copies and the public.

[apophenia]

10:48:10 PM •  • comment